DHS plans to separate migrant children from their parents at border crossings. This is disgusting on so many levels, but particularly hair-raising because our federal government has a history not only of failing to keep track of children under its care (1500 kids “missing” in 2017) but also has actually placed some migrant children under the care of traffickers, as with these Guatemalan teens forced to work on a chicken farm in Ohio by threat of death. H/T nicoleandmaggie for boosting the signal on this one. Call your senators to voice that both the separation itself and the lack of oversight into the welfare for these children are unacceptable.
Editor’s note: Apparently there is some Twitter controversy on the point of children being sufficiently tracked by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. The idea being that undocumented families are purposefully opting out of the system (being unresponsive to HHS oversight and therefore the children become “missing”) and that one should not call for additional scrutiny and monitoring of these families and children. While I agree this is probably what’s happening for the majority of these missing cases, it also gives me great pause to say follow up shouldn’t be necessary. A lot of it really depends on the rigor of the vetting process HHS uses to place children. But absent that information / expertise knowledge, I’ll stick to what I know to be true: i.e. separating children from their families is bogus and awful.
Facebook has come up with a new way to identify and prevent revenge porn from proliferating on its platform. The catch? You have to send FB your nude photos in order for it to work. What could possibly go wrong!?
In other tech surveillance dystopia news, Amazon Echo recorded this family’s conversation and sent it to a random person on their contact list. While these sort of one-off bug stories pop up once in a while, I really worry the extent to which people actively choose to bring these ambient-listening systems into their homes and on their persons. Even for those who choose not to opt in, there’s a constant throng of other people’s devices which I think over time will listen and collect data about us too, with or without our consent.
I love McSweeney’s. Particularly this piece, skewering the “well-meaning” affluent for their NIMBY housing policies: I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes.
I feel like this always gets lost when people talk about the constraints of being “politically correct” in America:
Sometimes, I like to delude myself that this is a particularly messed up era of politics. But then I remember good old Dick Nixon who, in order to improve his election chances, actively tried to sabotage peace talks to end the Vietnam War:
Yet Another PF Blog 